Total Marketing Solutions

Twitter - at first it’s fair to say no-one really got the point of Twitter. Do we really need more information, particularly if it’s only limited to providing a snapshot of what someone’s thinking at any one time? Or to be more precise, 140 characters worth of insight. Not much, you may think, but Twitter is now gaining favour as a unique way for businesses to provide increasingly choosy existing and potential consumers with a means to access information on products and services of interest to them. Businesses are now using Twitter as a marketing communications tactic to not only develop and promote their brand, they are using it to interact with their customer base. What’s more, it can be a powerful way to drive further traffic to your website. Tweet about your recent blog or some interesting resources recently added to your website and, if it’s interesting to your Twitter audience, their visits to your site will not only help boost your SEO rankings but they may also start tweeting about it on their own. We’re still looking at how best to use Twitter ourselves and have found some great information on http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-for-marketing/ - Take a look - you may be tweeting sooner than you think!

Just read an interesting article by Mark Satterfield at Gentle Rain Marketing on the importance of diversifying when times are tough.  He outlines a cafeteria-style approach to marketing your product and service offering, priced accordingly, rather than a belt-and-braces, one-size-fits-all approach. By unbundling the services you provide and offering a menu of different options, you could end up increasing the total number of clients you do business with and also increasing the average spend per customer. Back to basics - another option is to go right back to looking at what happens at your customers prior to them identifying a need to speak to you. He cites a search and selection company who identified a lack of internal candidates amongst their customers as being the obvious impetus behind them being retained. With this in mind, and recognising the difficult times ahead in their recruitment market sector, this company is now concentrating on developing succession planning programmes as a diversification away from their core business. Whilst this brings with it new competitors, it does give them  a chance to develop new opportunities.Even without using this approach to develop a new or different service proposition to take to market, we believe that developing a clear understanding of the factors that are influencing and driving your customers buying behaviour is an essential element to developing an effective marketing strategy. You should understand what situation are your customers in before they decide to speak to you. It could lead to you new ways of adding value and helping your customers?